Are ghosts haunting our babies? Is that why babies seem to be so upset with everything all the time? There’s probably more to it than ghosts, but recently parents using the Cocoon Cam baby monitoring system have been picking up mysterious apparitions with no known cause hanging around their children.

The Wall Street Journal talked to Natalie Wallace, an executive with a leadership development company in Los Angeles, who says she and her husband have seen human shaped, pink and purple apparitions on her Cocoon Cam baby monitor multiple times. The Cocoon Cam baby monitor is a video monitoring system that connects to an app on the your phone. Wallace says the first time she saw the strange shapes she was laying in bed and glanced at the baby monitor. She says she saw pink and purple shapes surrounding her infant’s bassinet. The colors themselves are not so strange in and of themselves, the Cocoon Cam system uses those colors to indicate motion. What’s weird is that there was nothing moving in the room and Wallace’s infant was fast asleep.

A few days later, Wallace says, her husband showed her some screenshots that he from the baby monitor app that showed what the Wallace’s describe as a human shaped blob floating over their sleeping baby. Shortly afterwards the single humanoid shape was replaced with a multitude of pink and purple apparitions, but no apparent source.

Gary McMath, Cocoon Cam’s marketing chief, blamed the apparitions on improper use of the baby monitor, saying that if it had been installed on a wall instead of standing on a dresser the ghosts wouldn’t have showed up. McMath says:

“When the camera is properly installed, the computer vision would focus on the baby’s motions—waking, sleeping, even breathing. I hope this clarifies the matter.”

McMath says that lights and shadows could have tripped up the Cocoon Cam’s motion sensor, and it does seem like the camera was pointed at the blinds behind the sleeping baby. Yet, when further questioned, McMath did admit that other customers had contacted cocoon cam with similar anomalies on their baby monitor.

Natalie Wallace says she and her husband tried to replicate the apparitions by moving things in front of the camera, rocking their baby’s bassinet, and seeing what showed up when their baby moved in the bassinet. They say that none of their tests reproduced the apparitions.

In the end, the Wallace family did what most of us would probably do. They shut off the video system and decided to only use the audio component of the baby monitor.

This dude needs to stop scaring our children.

Tobias Wayland at Singular Forteanpoints out that a few similar incidents of supposed spirit activity captured by different baby monitors have already occurred this year, and speculates that there seems to be a correlation between the rise in home monitoring systems and an increase of paranormal documentation.

It’s certainly true that there are more cameras everywhere, and it certainly feels like there are more paranormal photographs than ever. How many of those are the genuine article is up for debate. For every compelling paranormal photograph, there are 10 which are simply noise or a moth. There’s a lot of moths pretending to be ghosts.

With this one, it seems pretty likely that light coming in from the blinds confused the Cocoon Cam. After all, it’s more probable that a camera is bad at picking up light than a baby monitor company accidentally inventing proprietary ghost detecting technology. But if that is the case than I would suggest Gary McMath lean into that instead of trying to downplay it. That’s a billion dollar invention right there.

Sequoyah is a writer, music producer, and poor man's renaissance man based in Providence, Rhode Island. He spends his time researching weird history and thinking about the place where cosmic horror overlaps with disco. You can follow him on Twitter: @shkennedy33.